Updated Market Studies Show OCP Community Impact Is Accelerating Propelled by AI!
Austin, TX – December 1, 2025 –
The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP), a collaborative international organization bringing at-scale innovations and hyperscale best practices to all, once again worked with IDC, an independent market intelligence firm, to update their annual adoption study, capturing current and future forecasts of Data Center and IT equipment purchased worldwide based on OCP-recognized specifications. The recently completed study found that total spending on OCP-recognized IT infrastructure and solutions will grow to US$295 billion in 2029, up from US$132 billion in 2025, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.2%.
Server spending is expected to rise to $258.9 billion in 2029 (CAGR = 35.7%), while external storage and switching equipment represent the next largest segments of the market. Categories with the strongest spending growth include cooling technologies (CAGR of over 32%), power technologies (CAGR of 23.6%) and IT rack infrastructure (CAGR of 23.5%).
Among the findings:
- The OCP is now a large, diverse, and globally distributed community that includes over 500 corporate members, nearly 200 work efforts and thousands of active individual engineers.
- Although initially focused on large hyperscale data center operators and their vendors, OCP membership has expanded to include organizations from the neoclouds, telecoms, financial services, manufacturing, and oil and gas industries. Its focus has also expanded beyond “greenfield” new build datacenters to include “brownfield” datacenters (i.e., retrofits and refurbishments).
- In addition to contributing new technology specifications to the OCP Community, many members are important end users of OCP-recognized technologies themselves.
- Use of OCP-recognized infrastructure and technology designs goes beyond the organization’s formal membership. Worldwide use of OCP-recognized IT infrastructure continues to grow thanks partly to the way hardware designs are openly shared and available to any organization that wants to access and implement them.
- The ecosystem of OCP Solution Providers offering OCP-recognized infrastructure continues to grow and develop, encouraging adoption.
The deployment of AI infrastructure is predicted to experience robust growth, with total spending projected to reach around $155 billion by 2029. This strong forecast is largely driven by the increasing adoption of GPU-accelerated AI servers across hyperscalers, neocloud providers, and other organizations. The complete study, which includes breakdowns by equipment type and use case is available for download here.
Learn more in the free OCP webinar:
Understanding the Global Adoption of OCP Designs in Infrastructure Build-Outs – A view from IDC on adoption, spend, and buyer intent
Original Date: Thursday, January 22, 2026
Duration: 1 Hour
About Open Compute Project Foundation
The Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation brings hyperscale innovation to everyone by fostering open collaboration across the technology stack — from silicon to systems to data center facilities to the grid. With a global community of hyperscalers, cloud providers, enterprises, and technology vendors, OCP drives designs and standards that improve efficiency, scalability, and sustainability in data center and edge infrastructure worldwide.